Markets & Programs
Outreach
How urban agriculture relates to a soup kitchen.
Urban agriculture programs hold immense potential to be a vital part of a growing movement to bring fresh, nutritious, local food to urban residents. With our farm project, we hope to expand on the work of our parent organization, the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in its mission of feeding the hungry. The Capuchin Soup Kitchen has been serving the hungry since 1928 and provides thousands of meals and food baskets daily to Detroiters in need. Because so many Detroit families have been burdened with chronic poverty, many of the people served at the Soup Kitchen's facilities are families who have been in need for several decades. Addressing the roots of food system injustice is a crucial part of empowering our guests and neighbors to take action against poverty and hunger. We believe that a working farm is an ideal setting for modeling a socially just response to hunger.
Social justice in the food system.
Our "social justice" approach to food is rooted in a theory of community food security. Community food security is the ability of all community residents to obtain safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice. We partner with many other organizations around Detroit to participate in a comprehensive approach to many of the harms affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system. (More information about community food security can be found at www.foodsecurity.org) As such, it is encouraging to see the growing numbers of citizens choosing to explore and support alternative models of food production.
Our outreach actions.
Our outreach efforts support those who are looking for more information about the alternatives.
- We table at fairs and festivals to share with the community about Earthworks' mission and actions.
- We co-teach classes on urban community gardening and beekeeping.
- We welcome visitors during the annual Detroit Garden Tour and youth groups during the school year and summer time.
- We encourage our co-workers to participate in gardens and buy local foods.
- We present at various group meetings about the importance of beekeeping and environmentally sustainable agriculture.
- We involve local kids, and by extension, their families, in our youth programs about nutrition, gardening, and healthy living.
Supporting food security in our own backyard.
Earthworks volunteers and participants come from all over the Metro Detroit area to contribute work to the farm or learn skills related to community gardening. Community food security, however, requires that we reach beyond these typical audiences, who already value local food, to include others who may not yet know how their food choices could promote accessibility of high quality produce in their neighborhood. To do so, of course, requires effort. We have gone door to door to talk with our neighbors about opportunities to become involved in gardening and/or Earthworks programming because we know that some need a more direct invitation to visit the garden. We hope our neighborhood open house events will be welcoming occasions where we introduce people to the pleasures and benefits of gardening in Detroit. We are positively hopeful that fostering these type of information sharing and relationship building activities will inspire our community to make changes toward building a more just food system.
Additionally, we take cues from our Soup Kitchen guests (many of whom exist within the ranks of Detroit's hungry and under-fed) as we strive to demonstrate the Capuchin values for social engagement with people in need, by sharing meals and conversations with those we feed. Thus, we are in a unique position to respond to their concerns, ideas, and aspirations and develop our programming goals around their needs. In Summer 2008, Soup Kitchen guests and the Earthworks staff will regularly work together in our gardens and greenhouses. We envision this as an opportunity to nurture caring relationships, share gardening skills, promote food system literacy, and share thoughts and vision for what Earthworks can be with them.